Null and Vague

Un-Encoding

by Remy Porter
in CodeSOD
on 2016-12-08

Felix caught a ticket about their OpenId authentication. For some mysterious reason, it had started failing around 30% of the time, specifically because the access token returned by the service was invalid.

Felix had originally written the code, but there was one problem: he wasn’t the last one to touch it. Another development team needed their own versions of the code, organized a bit differently, for infrastructure reasons. Eventually, the whole thing was turned into a drop-in library component that was used by all applications which depended on OpenId. The failures started after they made their changes, so obviously their changes caused the failures.

Frozen Out

by Erik Gern
in Feature Articles
on 2016-12-07

Lex was an employee at GreyBox in the late 90s, a PC-repair shop inside of a large electronics chain. He had spent the entire morning handling phone calls from customer after customer. Each of the calls was supposed to go to his co-worker Gerald, but Gerald hadn’t been picking up his phone. Each caller complained that Gerald had taken in their computer for repairs and not actually done the repairs.

“I brought my laptop in yesterday,” one caller, a wheezy old man, said, “and the young man behind the counter just took the laptop and said, ‘come back in an hour’. He went into the back room, and when I came back, he looked like he had been drinking. You know, red faced and sweaty. And the laptop smelled funny- like corn chips. And it wasn’t fixed!”

Off in the Distance

by Remy Porter
in Representative Line
on 2016-12-06

Drew W got called in to track down a bug. Specifically, their application needed to take a customer’s location, and measure the distance to the nearest National Weather Service radar station. It knew the latitude and longitude of each, and needed to find the distance between those points, and it was wrong. It could be off by hundreds or even thousands of miles, especially in more remote locations.

The Infrastructure

by TJ Mott
in Feature Articles
on 2016-12-05

George had just escaped from his job, a WTF-laden hellhole where asking for a test database to reproduce an issue resulted in the boss spending hours and hours hand-typing and debugging a fresh SQL script based on an old half-remembered schema.

Initech promised to be a fantastic improvement. “We do things right around here,” his new boss, Harvey, told him after hiring him. “We do clean coding. Our development systems and libraries are fabulous! And each of our programmers get a private office with its own window!” Yay, no more cubicle!

Just The Fax, Ma'am

by Jane Bailey
in Feature Articles
on 2016-12-01

Gus had been working at his new job for a month. Most of his tickets had been for front-end work, making it easier and more efficient to manage the various vendors that the company did business with. These were important flags like "company does not accept UPS deliveries" or "company does not accept paper POs". The flags had been previously set via an aging web-based UI that only worked in Internet Explorer 6, but now they were migrating one at a time into the shiny new HTML5 app. It was tiring work, but rewarding.

Trimming the Fat

by Remy Porter
in CodeSOD
on 2016-11-30

There are certain developers who don’t understand types. Frustrated, they fall back on the one data-type they understand- strings. Dates are hard, so put them in strings. Numbers aren’t hard, but they often exist in text boxes, so make them strings. Booleans? Well, we’ve come this far- strings it is.

Tyisha has the displeasure of working with one such developer, but with a twist- they didn’t really understand strings, either. Tyisha only supplied a small example: